Thursday, April 4, 2013

Cerulean Sins--chapter 19-20

I am so happy right now it is insane.I thought the new tablet would be kind of a downgrade because it is smaller than the old one (Both are intros, but the old tablet was like, first generation intros, and the 9by12 model, whereas the new one is intros 4 and 8 by 5) but OH MY GOD, HOW WAS I FUNCTIONING WITH THAT THING BEFORE? The pressure sensitivity was breaking down. IDK if it was because the tablet itself was breaking or because photoshop CS5 doesn't talk nicely with the old drivers, but HOLY SHIT I HAVE MISSED HAVING WORKING TABLETS.

Best. Investment. Ever.

Right. Sucky book.

I think the one thing Laurel needs to unlearn is copy and pasting things together. I'd say "copy and pasting her outlines" but I'm pretty confident she doesn't do that. Because we're going to another crime scene and it is basically second verse same as the first, until we get to Dolph.

There are cop cars, there are reporters, this time it is upper middle class instead of the dwelling of the one percent, and instead of a pissing contest involving a cop concerned about actually doing his job, it is the press trying to get a picture of a dead body or Jean Claude's lover, whichever comes with a bigger paycheck.

I think Laurel K Hamilton leaves her house every morning and sighs because she doesn't have to fight fifteen reporters just to take the dog for a walk.

This time Anita mentions she left her crime scene kit at home for reasons that make no logical sense (something to do with the coveralls getting in the way of the animating job, but it still doesn't explain why she couldn't keep the thing in the car) and tells Jason not to touch things until she finds gloves.

You also need a hair net and booties for your shoes, but we'll take what we can get.

The other cops look like they're puking, which means its a bad one. They discuss this and make misogynstic jokes with each other because it keeps them from thinking about whatever it is in the back room, and you know what? Even my stunted little feminist soul would tolerate a couple cracks at womanhood and genitalia if it meant the cop in front of me didn't have a full on breakdown due to whatever they saw in there.

And again, we're pretty much pretending that Defense Attorneys do not exist in this universe, because nobody makes Jason wait on the civilian side of the yellow tape.

They go into the kitchen and run into Dolph.

Dolph has totally flipped his fucking shit.

One of my personal heroes is Dave Reichert, the cop who was with the Green River case from the day they found the first bodies to the day they arrested Gary Ridgeway. I've probably said this before. Mostly because anybody who could spend most of his career following some of the most hideous crimes in the history of his state and then sit in the same room as the little weasel and not shoot him is a better human being than I will ever be.

This is the vid with his interview with Gary. It's...interesting. I want you to watch it (the relivant part starts at 3:01) and then keep that dude in mind when you read LKH's "respectful" representation of a senior cop.

First thing Dolph does is try to kick Jason out because he isn't human. Let me recap that the ONLY reason Jason is on this side of the tape is because Anita might faint. He's got no business there for real, he knows it, Anita knows it, Dolph knows it, and the only reason he's there is Anita wants him and she's not going to listen to the other cops tell her that she can't have an uneducated, untrained civilian tramping through an active crime scene when the bodies are still on the ground.

And then Dolph sends her out. The text says it is because of somebody non human, but it really looks like Dolph is just sick of her shit. (or that the author left her logic with her other publisher)

He took one step towards me. He loomed over me, but I was used to that, a lot of people loomed over me. “Never question my professionalism again, Anita, never.”

“When you act like a professional, I won’t.”

His hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides. “You want to see why I don’t want him at this scene? You want to see it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I want to see it.”

So he drags her into the bedroom, literally, so that she's stumbling and struggling along behind him and is given every reason in the world to file a harassment suit against the department, and she's thrown into a crime scene where half the body (female, of course,) has been liquified and thrown all over the room.

“What do you think?” Dolph said, and he pushed me, trapped between his big hands, towards the bed. “Pretty enough for you? Because one of your friends did this.”

Congradu-fucking-lations, Dolph, you have just graduated into "moron". Obviously, cops in this universe do not look for tool marks or alibis or trace evidence, and they don't question friends and relatives. Nope, they go for the most obvious: Random werewolf.

Other cops begin insisting that Anita has seen enough crime scene for today, but Dolph takes her over to a random scratch that could be a claw mark or a mark from a claw hammer for all they know, because it's still an active crime scene, and shoves her face in it like she's a dog that piddled on the new carpet.

Dolph turned on him, and I think only the fact that his hands were already full kept him from grabbing Perry. “She knows. She knows what did this, because she knows every fucking monster in town.”

Guys, this makes Strawchick from Gor look like a well rounded and realistically developed character.

Dolph keeps on manhandling Anita until she finally commits a felony and stomps both his instep and solar plexus to get away from him. Of course she isn't arrested. Instead she literally crawls out of an active crime scene on her hands and knees, reaches the top of the stairs and then either collapses there or faints and falls down the fucking stairs because NOT having our female protagonist faint every other fucking chapter is asking too fucking much, apparently.

5 comments:

Dolph just proved that Anita is not needed at the crime scene since he's already done the whole "poke at the dead body and speculate that it was a monster" schtick that Anita's 'good' for.

And yes, Dolph is way unbalanced here, but... he's right. Anita's been working with the cops forever, and she's also protecting a multitude of murders and monsters (herself being the most blatant example). Here she comes in, mucking up evidence only to ultimately get in the way of due process by hiding the criminal or killing him herself illegally, then hiding the crime.I like to think that Dolph just snapped and decided that if she was going to mess up evidence, then it might as well be by him literally shoving her face in it.

" I think Laurel K Hamilton leaves her house every morning and sighs because she doesn't have to fight fifteen reporters just to take the dog for a walk."

That's the impression I get too.

Dolph is one in a long line of character assassinations that came after she destroyed Richard, including Ronnie. General consensus is that they're supposed to represent LKH's detractors for taking the series in the direction she has.

And of course those detractors never have a real point, even when they have a good point. They're just haters.

Actually, I should write LKH a nice thank-you note. Thanks to her author-inserts Anita Sue and Merry Sue, I now have a better understanding of how Mary Sues in general work. For a Mary Sue, the fictional world works the way a narcissist thinks the real world should work: Unchallenged privilege, mastery of complex subjects without real effort, access to all the truly important things in the world... All are the Sue's entitlement, right down to the unearned praise for Being Special without having to actually do anything special.

Although maybe that's not the lesson she wants people to take away from her works.